Convenience Store Boyfriends is the anime adaptation of the B's-Log Comic mixed-media project, having first been realised in prose and audio drama. It is this cynical, detached approach to storytelling that I think has caused the production to concern itself with the modern sensibilities of its audience. It is a series that appears to have been designed by committee, looking to utilise its high school genre, setting and character, to best appeal to, not only the romance anime fan, but a younger, more socially aware generation. It is in the conflict between these two demographics that we see the failure of Convenience Store Boyfriends' reconciliation. In one of the focal romantic relationships, between the character Honda, a popular soccer player, and Mihashi, the stalwart "Class Rep", we see the struggle between playing into safe generic tropes and appealing to an audience that has long moved past them.
As it has been said that Japan is still some time away from its "#MeToo" moment, it is noteworthy that, at least for a little while, Convenience Store Boyfriends put issues of consent and harassment right at the forefront of its depiction of this relationship. Honda is berated for his retrograde attempts to impress and romance the Class Rep, who often makes it clear that these are unwanted advances. It is in the return to trope where this all falls apart. Due to its nature as a romance anime, and its unwillingness to make any major diversions from its tropes, the Class Rep soon gains the confidence to accept the previously undesired advances. Issues of consent abound in the discussion of the anime trope, "tsundere", used to refer to female characters who disguise their true feelings behind layers of animosity, that the male protagonist must strip back in order to pursue the desired relationship. It's a female character seen across not just anime, but throughout all of literature, but it is the anime tsundere who is most well-known for their predictable behaviours and for promoting morally dubious wish fulfilment narratives. This is the character archetype that the Class Rep is forced to become because of Convenience Store Boyfriends' need to fall back on trope.
Yet those early moments, where it does seem like the series wants to offer us something interesting, were extremely exciting. Not just as viewers of television, but as citizens; for its, otherwise unimpressive, early episodes seemed to suggest that serious social change was taking hold and that the dangerous romantic tropes of yesteryear were being cast-aside for a new look at how modern relationships can, and should, be formed. So when this was done away with, Convenience Store Boyfriends' actually yielded from me its biggest emotional response. My sense of disappointment was palpable.
So, what does the failed reconciliation of trope then tell us? Is the failure to reconcile the tsundere trope with modern sensibilities down to the quality of this production or is it due to the irreconcilable nature of these tropes? I would argue that it is a little of both. Certainly Convenience Store Boyfriends' is no major piece of revisionary work. For example, the tsundere is not the only trope to be promised subversion and then remain unchanged in Convenience Store Boyfriends' (though it is certainly the most prominent and worthy of inspection). The step-sister romance, the strict household impeding romance, the school festival, the one that got away and so on, all make an appearance in this series that wants to play it by the numbers that no one uses anymore. The series has some very weak, uninspired storytelling, that means they can never get across their new perspective on tired tropes. More than that though, I would say that the attempt was doomed from the start. Even if the studio behind Convenience Store Boyfriends' wanted to pursue a new approach to the romance genre, they could never do so while still attached to tropes like the tsundere. I'd like to see an expectation-subverting story, where the person who thinks they are the romantic lead is shut down for misogynistic behaviour, but that show simply wouldn't be a romance show any longer. The tropes and genre effects are simply not fit for use when it comes to creating romantic stories for modern sensibilities.
The show does have one really nice song though. And a plot twist that I'm sure the whole board room were patting themselves on the back for.
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